“It’s too humid for lightning,” Todd said with considerable authority. He walked back in from his balcony.

“Is that really part of the equation?” I asked.

“I don’t really know.”

“Look, there’s more lightning,” said Anderson.

“We can’t even hear the thunder. It’s way off,” I pointed out.

“Are you really doing this?” Anderson asked Todd.

“Of course.”

And so everyone was onboard. Anderson wasn’t really concerned about the weather. He was stalling because one of his three fears was heights and we were about to hop the fence at a construction site and climb a 160 foot crane. And, if possible, walk to the very end of the boom.

The activity falls neatly into my favorite quadrant of life experiences. Morally sound but illegal. It’s not that I particularly enjoy breaking the law, although there is some thrill to it, but it’s more that they make fun things illegal.

Things that are dangerous enough that someone could get sued, but safe enough that someone with common sense would never get hurt.

The crane hovered over a demolished RV park which yielded to a new condo development that had just broken ground. Every time Todd or I would pass it we’d look up at the crane. It had to be climbed.

Cameras in tow, we walked to the fence. A quick look for witnesses or police in either direction passed, we hopped over the fence, and slid into the shadows of the construction site.

So far, so good. As far as I know, police don’t look at cranes to see if anyone is climbing them, so our most likely time to be caught was over.

The actual climbing is boring. Cranes are sectional and each twenty foot section has a ladder that leads to the next section. The view became more magnificent with each section.

I’ve been up a couple cranes in my day. At the top there are two payoffs. One, sometimes the control cabin is unlocked and you can sit in the chair. It has windows 180 degrees in each direction and tons of controls, so when you sit in the chair you feel like you’re piloting a spaceship.

Hey, no one’s ever accused me of being too mature.

The second payoff is that sometimes the boom of the crane, the horizontal part at the top, has a walkway inside it so that you can walk to the end.

We hit the jackpot. There was a walkway and the door was unlocked.

We started down the walkway. The first obstacle was a giant reel of steel cable that blocked the passage about halfway through.

Either I could slither under it, or I could move to the outside of the crane and shuffle across the side beam. I chose the latter, mainly because it was scary and seemed more fun. It was both of those things, ten or so steps of watching my feet slide across a four inch beam with the backdrop of the RV park 160 feet below.

My stomach got that roller coaster feeling. This is what life is about, I thought. Let go with my hands and I’m dead. You feel alive by contrast.

After I got past the reel I swung back onto the path in the middle of the boom and kept walking. Any fear of that type of section was totally demolished by climbing on the outside.

Near the end, the path changed again. To cross the last thirty feet, it would be necessary to go back on the outside. This was a lot scarier because we were now so far out that every move sent shockwaves of movement through the whole beam, and because it was at least four times longer than the previous outside section.

Deep breath.

I ducked under the railing and went on the outside. Not so bad. I looked down, as if to reinforce that what I was doing was scary. Christmas lights flickered under trees in the RV park. I was high up. I focused on making sure that three appendages were touching the crane at all times.

Could our 450 pounds or so cause the crane to tilt forward? Probably not, but if so, I planned my course of action. I would straddle a vertical beam and hold on for dear life. Further thought made me realize that this crane probably doesn’t even have that axis.

Finally we made it out to the end and sat with our feet dangling off the edge. It’s the most perfect view of Austin you can have, not impeded on any side.

After half on hour of singing songs, joking around, watching bats fly a few feet away, and taking pictures, we headed back. No one was afraid anymore as we gingerly hopped across the outside.

Anderson recited a good quote:

“There’s a difference between living and actually being alive.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Here are some photos. They’re mostly poor quality because it was just moonlight and I have no flash.

Tucker Max and I will probably never be friends. We live by a lot of the same principles, but those principles have led us in very different directions. His daily pleasure is getting trashed and being obnoxious. Mine is eating vegan food and riding an electric skateboard.

Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s a pretty impressive human being. He’s a much better writer than I am, and has made his living based on just living his life and documenting it.

I like his normal site, but his new blog about making his movie is even better. He does an incredible job explaining what goes into making a movie, and the blog really showcases his dedication to excellence.

When I was picking up my RV recently I saw that my route back to Austin was going to pass only an hour away from Shreveport where he’s filming.

Being a Q-List internet celebrity doesn’t get you much, but it’s generally enough to convince people that I’m not some weird stalker fanboy. I wrote Tucker an e-mail asking if I could visit the set to see how a movie was made.

I felt a bit guilty asking to come by because I know that making a movie already leaves you with 10% more things to do than you have time for, and the last thing you need is some new person standing in the middle of things asking you questions.

The next day the AP sent me an e-mail to arrange for me to visit the set. Awesome.

I arrived in New York from London and visited my good friend Phil. I told him about visiting the set and he became uncharacteristically riled up. He hates Tucker Max. He met him once and apparently he was a huge asshole.

I was certainly interested in meeting Tucker, but was mainly going to see behind the scenes of a movie so he could be whatever kind of asshole he wanted and I’d still be happy.

I had intended to visit in the morning, stay for a couple hours, and then head back on my way. Staying at Katya’s the night before messed up my schedule and put me on track to arrive at the set at 5pm. I think I forgot to account for sleeping when I planned my route initially.

I called and luckily filming was going to last until seven or so, so I’d have time to check things out.

By the time I got there I was a total zombie. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep for the past two nights and had almost just parked, napped, and blown off the movie.

I wandered onto the total chaos of the movie set. People were running around everywhere adjusting things and looking for people. Tucker walked by me without even noticing that I was there, focused on yelling at someone in front of him.

“Hey… I’m Tynan.”

“Oh hey - good to meet you. Come on in.”

I followed him as he breezed into the building. The inside was even more packed with people. Everyone was doing something.

For the next hour or two I watched as they filmed one of the final scenes in the movie. It was an awesome sight.

Maybe I caught him on an off day, but Tucker wasn’t an asshole at all. When his attention wasn’t required somewhere on set, which was about half the time, he’d stand next to me and explain what was going on. Since all of this stuff was new to him too he was able to explain it all clearly in layman terms.

Here are some of the interesting things I learned, some of which may be applicable to all movies, and some of which may be unique to Tucker’s movie. I have no frame of reference, so take all that with a grain of salt.

• Very little is shot in any given day. They were shooting ONE scene all day. They just keep redoing it from different angles, focusing on different people, with slightly different timing, with an moving camera instead of the main actor, etc.
• Scenes are shot totally out of order, based on availability of actors, locations, and a number of other factors.
• I now understand why acting is hard. In the scene you are reacting to past events that you’ve never actually shot, AND you have to do it the same way with the right emotions fifty times in a day. It’s not all glitz and glamor - these guys are working.
• There is insane attention being paid to every detail. One woman was taking pictures of everyone’s hair so that if they needed to reshoot a scene later the hair would be exactly the same. Another person’s job was to watch the scenes as they were filmed and watch for continuity.
• The atmosphere was way more collaborative than expected. Most decisions had several people offering input, including actors.
• There was a lot of genuine camaraderie on the set. Not the forced I’m-working-with-you-so-I’ll-be-polite sort of thing, but more of a I’m-going-to-smash-this-prop-cake-in-your-face-when-we-wrap sort of vibe. In fact, Tucker seemed more concerned that the cake smash was caught on camera than many other aspects of the movie.
• This may have been influenced by what I’d read beforehand, but I definitely felt like everyone there was really thrilled to be working on the project and was proud of the job they were doing. Even a couple extras I talked to seemed to take a lot of pride in the whole thing. Maybe this happens on all movies, but I suspect it doesn’t.

I had a great time visiting the set and have nothing but good things to say about Tucker, Jeff the AP, and everyone else I met.

They were filming one of the last scenes of the movie when I was there, even though it was the third day of filming. I can’t talk about the content of the scene, but it leads up to what is probably the last scene of the movie. The buildup seems very typical Hollywood, but I have a hunch that it’s actually going to be something totally unexpected.

I was tempted to ask, but why ruin the surprise? I’ll see the movie as soon as it comes out.

Mandeville.

I looked at the route that Google Maps gave me to drive my RV back to Austin. The route went right past Mandeville, Louisiana. That’s where Katya lives.

I hadn’t seen her in years. We broke up four years ago, and I only saw her once since then, three years ago. She randomly showed up with her fiancee and took all of the big stuff she’d left at my house. Her fiancee apologized as we carried her bed frame that I’d been sleeping on for a year to his car.

The last time I talked to her was over a year ago. She called while I was recovering from lasering my eyes, so I was basically disabled and sort of groaned and mumbled while she told me about her sentence in jail. I hung up with the distinct idea that I’d probably never talk to her again.

Not intentionally, just a “I probably won’t call her, and these calls can’t be very satisfying to her” sort of thing.

Anyway, seeing her city was a fleeting thought. One of many little things that make me think about her for a second and move on.

Later in the day I straightened out my US cell phone service. Most people don’t leave me messages on my old phone number because it says not to, but a few slip though. I check them once a month.

“Three new messages. First new message. From 504…”

That’s Katya’s area code. It seems like every time she calls it’s from a different number, but I always know it’s her because it begins with 504.

The first message is blank. So is the second. The third one comes on and I’m expecting it to be blank too.

“Hi Herbal!”

It’s her, and she just happened to call the day before I was going to be driving right by where she lives. It’s the only time I’ve driven by there since breaking up four years ago.

The next day as I’m driving the RV I call her back. We chat for a while and catch up. She says she’s got her life together. She’s going to school, working at her mom’s salon, and trying to transfer to Loyola.

“I’m going to come visit you.”

“When?”

“Tonight. I can’t make it there until 2am, though. Will you be awake?”

“I don’t care what time you come. You can sleep over here.”

And so I continued driving with six hours to think about the visit before it actually took place. What would it be like to see her? I had no idea if I’d be happy to see her, angry, or something in between.

Just before 2am I pulled into her neighborhood. I’d only been there a few times, but it still looked familiar. I was nervous, not because of what she’d think of me, but because of what I’d think of her.

I called her and told her I was outside.

She answered the door in a baggy t shirt and pajama pants. She looked beautiful and was smiling at me in that adoring way that made me go crazy for her in the first place. I was glad I came to see her.

She was always the right size for me. When we hugged her head nestled under my neck like it always had. Even though it had been so long, it still felt familiar.

We walked upstairs to her room and sat on her bed. I told her about my trip and she told me about her life. I told her that I was proud and happy for her, and she told me that I had the most interesting life and was weird.

Past memories were recounted in conspiring tones with wide grins across our faces. Past offenses against each other were brought up with understated apologies and were dismissed with smiles.

After talking for a couple hours I was exhausted and laid down. She turned off the light.

“Come here.”

She slid over and laid her head on my chest just as she used to back when we were together.

Suddenly it was as if we had never broken up. It was as if the last four years were just 30 minutes as I ran to the store to pick something up. The intimate familiarity of being with someone I’d loved and lived with overpowered the four years without contact.

I pulled her face towards me and kissed her. It’s impossible to describe what a kiss feels like, but it’s something you never forget and can always recognize, even years later.

The next morning we woke up early after getting not nearly enough sleep. Even though I got in late, I had to leave early to keep my schedule.

I was sad to say goodbye. This is a girl that drove me absolutely crazy in both the good way and the bad way. I loved her and hated her in equal parts while we dated, sometimes at the same time. She’s not right for me and I wouldn’t ever date her again.

But at the same time I’m glad we don’t live closer, because I would keep seeing her and slide into that “we’re not officially dating, but we actually are” grey area. No one who knows us both would ever see us as a reasonable couple, yet there’s this unbreakable attraction that survives four years of almost no contact.

She called the next day and we talked about nothing. It was one of those conversations where neither of us are saying anything, but neither one wants to hang up either. With some people you get to the point where phone conversations are no longer acceptable substitutes for actually talking in person.

Maybe I’ll see her soon. My life is unpredictable and you just never know. Maybe our paths won’t cross for another year. Maybe we’ll never see each other again. Each possibility is roughly equally likely, but I’ll be happy if the opportunity to see her again comes sooner rather than later.

I had just stumbled across a site called www.hackaday.com, and I was fascinated. Most of the hacks were too nerdy for me to really be interested in, but one stuck out.

“Build a Hovercraft for under $100″

Yeah! As a kid I would always read the classifieds section of the Boy Scout magazine, and salivate over the plans to build a hovercraft. I wanted to build one and ride it around in school instead of walking.

My parents didn’t go for that idea.

I was pumped that I would finally get my day. My friend Andrew was at my hous. I told him that I was going to build a hovercraft, and he said that it was impossible.

We bet $100 on whether or not I could build it in a day. Perfect - that was my budget.

My friend Nick was over too. He was also excited about the hovercraft and he agreed to help me build it.

Off to Home Depot.

We bought a huge square of fiberboard. We were hoping to find a round piece, but couldn’t. No problem. My father is a carpenter and I used to get his hand-me-down tools, so I had plenty of saws.

Duct tape. Check.

PVC tarp for the skirt. Check.

Leaf blower. The leaf blower is what pumps the air into the skirt and lifts the thing off the ground. They suggest an electric one, but that wasn’t going to give me the range I wanted.

Knowing that I’d be getting $100 for winning the bet, I splurged and bought the biggest and baddest gas leaf blower they had available for around $85.

They suggested gluing the leaf blower to the hovercraft, but I got sidetracked in the plumbing department and spent an hour - literally - combining pipes and toilet fittings and such until I came up with an awesome mount for the leaf blower. It would be removable for easy transportation.

Then we went home and got to work. The construction was pretty easy, all things considered. We rounded out the corners, mounted the piping, and built the skirt.

The hardest part was doing all the duct taping that was required. The instructions called for completely covering the bottom with tape to make it more durable. It wasn’t that the labor was hard - the problem was that we were so close that it was hard to resist just flipping it over and trying it.

Finally we finished the construction and the moment of truth was upon us.

We cleared out a big area in the middle of the garage and fired up the leaf blower. Sure enough, the hovercraft created a little cushion of air to float on. Sawdust blew out from all directions.

I sat on it. and it supported my weight. It worked!

At first we were happy just taking turns pushing around my little driveway, but that didn’t last.

Soon we invested in brakes, which was a kid’s spiderman themed boxing glove that the driver would wear and drag on the ground to slow down.

We found that even a slight hill in a parking lot would provide enough acceleration to get some decent speed.

But that wasn’t good enough either.

Before long we were scoping out huge office park driveways that didn’t have speedbumps (surprisingly hard to find). We would tie a rope to a car and take turns pulling each other at 30mph.

Now that was fun. So fun, in fact, that when the Pick Up Convention came to Austin, a good portion of the attendees opted to skip going out in favor of hoverboarding.

Finally after a series of abuse, the skirt got too many holes and wouldn’t float very well. When I moved out of my house I gave the rig away to a father who wanted to fix it up for his son.

Maybe he’ll get to drive it in school. How bad could the carbon monoxide really be?

Boy Meets World was my favorite show ever. I bought a huge clunky VCR from a garage sale, ,and would use it to record every rerun I could find. On Fridays I couldn’t wait to go home and watch the new episodes.

But besides providing a world of entertainment and a huge crush on Topanga, the show also added something to my lifetime list of musts. I had to climb into a girl’s window at night. Hey… that sounds like I’m a rapist. I mean when she’s expecting me.

I was talking to a girl online that I had a crush on, who also had a crush on me. Maybe the only genuine crush I’ve had since becoming a pick up artist.

“I want to see you.”

“I can’t. I’m at my parent’s house and they have an alarm.”

(note - this girl was not underage.)

“That’s okay. I’ll build a rope ladder and climb up.”

It was a joke.

“Really?”

Hmm.

“Yes. I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Okay.”

I went online and found a site that showed how to make rope ladders. Then I drove to Wal Mart and bought two really long ropes.

It took me a lot longer than an hour to get to her house, because making a rope ladder isn’t as easy as it seems. With that firsthand knowledge under my belt I parked a few houses down, opened the trunk, and dragged my balled up rope ladder to her house.

What would the neighbors think if they saw that? What possible reason would I have for having half a kilometer of rope balled up in my arms at midnight in the suburbs?

I crept up her driveway and pushed past the bushes. Her room was in the front, exposed to the street. We whispered to each other and she threw down a kite string.

That was smart. I hadn’t thought of how to get the ladder up to her.

I tied the string to my homemade ladder and she pulled it up to her window. I was expecting her to be really impressed with my ladder and shower praises down upon me. I was really proud of it.

“Ok, I tied it.”

Close enough.

I began climbing up the rope. Since the rungs were just made out of rope, the sides clamped down on my shoes as I tried to climb. The rope swung back and forth as I climbed past the first story window.

That’s why they don’t show this shot on TV. It’s clumsy. You always see the grand entrance from the inside.

I finally made it up to the top. I pulled myself in through the window and scrambled across her desk onto the floor, headfirst like a worm.

Smooth.

Then I saw her “knot”. All she had done was wrap the excess around one of the legs of her desk and was holding onto the other end. I guess they’re too busy selling cookies in girl scouts to teach knot tying.

We got into her bed and true to the act’s sitcom roots, we made out and engaged in light petting. The only difference was that there was no audience to say “oooh!”, and every slight noise made me wonder if her father, a gun owner, would randomly drop in.

He didn’t, and a few hours later I climbed back down and drove away. It’s always satisfying when you just did something that could land you in trouble and are now in the clear.

I sat in my car and turned the key. That’s when a thought hit me hard, so hard that I remember it today, several years later.

Her parents had no idea that one of the most well known pick up artists in the world were in their daughter’s bed as they slept. They wouldn’t have ever considered the bizarre and remote possibility of it. It couldn’t possibly enter their minds. But it happened.

Later she would become my girlfriend, and they both ended up liking me, ironically.

But that thought led me to another more startling one. What don’t I know? What things that I could never possibly contemplate have occurred? What things will I never know?

Our dorm building had a square footprint. In the very middle were three elevators serving the dorm rooms which were all positioned along the edges of the building. In between the elevators and the rooms was a square hallway that ran in a loop.

This was to be our arena for Golf Darts, a sport we invented to aid our more scholarly pursuit - procrastination.

On one door we set up a target. The goal was to go around the hallway, arrive back at the target and hit it.

Darts were thrown at walls. Hitting the same wall twice in a row incurred a two stroke penalty. So did hitting the water (the floor).

The game was fun, but the most fun part may have been the danger we brought to the floor. As we went around the hallway people would exit their dorms only to be greeted by darts whizzing past their faces.

Most of them would be intrigued by the spectacle and would follow the ever growing pack of spectators following us around the circuit.

The one problem was the doors. At the end of each side of the square hallway was a door, which became a popular target. After playing for an hour or two they had become littered with holes concentrated in one area. It looked really bad.

Terry pounded a long shot into a wall. He missed the door, but also avoided the dreaded carpet by half a foot. He continued down the hall and I wound up to throw.

Just as I was about to release the dart, the door to the stairwell in front of me opened up. It was our RA.

She looked at me, and then at the crowd behind me.

“Tynan… what are you doing?”

“Oh… just hanging out.”

She gave me a suspicious look. My poker face wasn’t all that convincing.

“…. and playing golf darts.”

She turned around and saw Terry’s dart stuck in the wall. I looked behind me because no one else seemed to be chiming in. They were gone, hiding in dorm rooms. I wanted to escape too, but it was too late.

She took the dart, shook her head, and started to leave when something else caught her eye.

The door full of dart holes.

“Oh no. This is too much. I try to be cool with you guys and cut you some slack, but you have destroyed the door. I have to write you up. I have no choice.”

She left.

We didn’t want to face the wrath of the building manager again. He had recently forced us to take down a porch light we installed in the hallway as well as a large brass knocker on our door. To try to remedy the situation I set up a meeting with him, which ended with him standing over his desk, face beet red, yelling at me.

And that wasn’t our only encounter. He had also confiscated my lock picking gun earlier, and refused to return it.

So we did what any unreasonable group of college kids would do. We chipped off a corner of the door and headed to home depot.

We used the corner of the door to match the color of the paint. We bought rollers, tape, putty and a putty knife.

The work took longer than we expected, but maybe that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise since none of us had ever repaired a door. By the end the two doors we painted actually looked better than they did before we destroyed them.

Our RA was equally impressed.

“Oh my god! I can’t believe what a good job you guys did. I went into the RA office and tore up the report I wrote about you.”

Mission accomplished.

More than fifty years ago, my mother’s father went to a dance. Back then that was how you met people.

The room was divided into two sides. The guys were standing near one wall, and the girls were at the other. In the middle were a few couples dancing, but more prominent was the wide open space that separated the two groups.

No man’s land.

In my mind I imagine that it was brightly lit, lights illuminating the gym floor. I picture people hiding in the shadows on either side, huddled in groups.

That’s probably not what it was really like, but that’s what it felt like when my grandfather decided to make the trek over to the other side. He had a crush on a girl named Elaine and wanted to ask her to dance.

But she didn’t want to dance with him. She wasn’t particularly interested in him, but she was compassionate. She knew how embarrassing it was to walk to the side, and how much more it would be to walk back across alone.

“Sure.”

After they danced, my grandfather told her something that he had probably rehearsed in his mirror a thousand times.

“You know, we used to live in the same tenement building. Do you remember?”

She didn’t.

“I have a picture of us both sitting on the steps. Would you like to see it some time?”

She agreed. She visited his house, saw the picture, and he asked her on a date, which she accepted.

The timing was good for him. As a an accountant he had finally made enough money to save up for a car, which he would be getting before their date.

He drove his new car to pick her up, and parked a block away.

As they walked down the street he pointed out the new car.

“Wow. Look at that beautiful car.”

It wasn’t beautiful. In fact, it was an unusual pea green color. She wasn’t impressed.

“It’s nice, John.”

He moved closer to the car, examining it carefully.

“Let’s sit inside it. It looks so nice.”

She thought he was weird and wasn’t especially comfortable sitting in someone else’s car. He laughed and told her that he had just bought it.

As they drove home he made a crucial mistake that no man should ever make.

“Would you like to drive it?”

She didn’t have much experience driving, but after a bit of cajoling she took the wheel.

Then she backed it into a wall.

They got out and examined the damage to his brand new car.

“That’s okay. It’s no big deal.”

He didn’t say another word about it, and acted as if it hadn’t even happened. She was impressed, and they continued dating and ended up getting married.